What neuroscience can tell us about our sense of place and sense of direction.

25/11/2019

The ‘architecture’ of cognition. How is spatial information represented in the brain?
Kate Jeffery is Professor of Neuroscience, Faculty of Brain Sciences. UCL.
0:00 – Introduction. What information do we need when navigating space. City legibility.
1:48 – How do people form representations of places. Spaces that are difficult to navigate.
3:38 – Neuroanatomy. Primary and secondary areas of the brain. The cortex.
5:18 – The subcortex and hippocampus.
6:29 – The parietal lobe. The ‘egocentric’ map. Parietal damage.
9:40 – Habit based large scale movement. The subcortical striatum.
11:45 – The role of the hippocampus.
12:58 – Neuroimaging.
14:15 – Virtual reality.
16:28 – Identifying and ‘recording’ single neurons.
21:00 – ‘Patterns’ of nerve impulses.
21:42 – ‘Place cells’ and ‘mapping’.
23:22 – In what sense are place cells about space.
24:35 – Mapping.
25:22 – The search for a form of isomorphism.
28:00 – The hippocampus, place cells, memory and ‘mapping’.
28:30 – London taxi drivers.
29:43 – Testing on humans. Do humans have ‘place’ cells.
31:20 – Spatial imagination and coherence.
33:07 – ‘Head direction cells’.
37:15 – The entorhinal cortex, neuronal activity and spatial location. Distance and direction. The ‘grid’ cells.
45:00 – The place cells, the head direction cells, the grid cells and border cells.
46:00 – The work of Kevin Lynch. Edges, landmarks.
51:15 – Incoherent or less coherent spaces.
53:00 – Rotational symmetry.
53:45 – Mirror symmetry.
54:50 – Distant landmarks.
57:00 – Can the brain make a 3D map of space.
59:30 – More advanced ‘mapping’ of the brain.

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